All week Astana have been waiting for the queen stage in the Tour of Hainan. Andrey Zeits proved that he is one of the strongest climbers in the race but was unable to drop Julien Antomarchi on the final climb.

“After the last climb we had 90 seconds on the leaders, but with Lampre chasing we had to attack the descent as well – a rough, wet, steep road through the jungle down to the finish," Andrey Zeits said after stage seven at the Tour of Hainan. With three first category climbs, Sunday was the single most important day for General Classification.

Tropical rain again fell on the riders in Sunday’s five hours of racing from the sea coast into Hainan’s exotic bamboo jungle interior. Zeits finished second on Sunday, one second behind stage winner Julien Antomarchi of France, who now leads Zeots in the overall classification by 25 seconds with two days of competition to go. Zeits leads the Best Asian Rider classification.

Teammate Alexandr Dyachenko and Zeits showed great strength on the third and final climb on Sunday, and by working together with Arman Kamyshev and Ruslan Tleubayev they effectively reduced the peloton to around 30 riders at the front with 20km to the finish. Closer to the summit Astana Pro Team isolated key rivals from Lampre, as Dyachenko, Zeits and Antomarchi broke away to create an advantage of more than one minute over the top but Antomarchi refused to work on the climb and only came to the front on the downhill.

Lampre was able to retake nearly one minute on the descent, and as Dyachenko lost contact Zeits was caught between trying to outsprint a fresh Antomarchi for the stage and trying to stay away from the approaching peloton.

“I’ve done everything I could to get rid of the boy from Marseille”, Zeits explained. “But we rode together downhill where it was slippery because of the rain earlier on. I heard we had an advantage of 1.12 atop the hill and only 20 seconds at the bottom. As a team, we wanted a better result than what we got today but we’ve done our best and now I lead the Asian rider classification. I wasn’t sure if we’d manage to beat Wang Meiyin there but we did. He’s very strong on the flat, he’s got power for sprinting but he’s bigger than me and I think I had an advantage over him because of my physique in the hills today.”